A US inquiry found that Apple booked two-thirds of its $34bn (£22.3bn) global profits in 2011 in companies registered in Cork.
Photograph: maxim.photoshelter.com/Alamy

An Irish parliamentary committee has voted down calls for multinational companies to be grilled in Dublin about their tax affairs, in the wake of a string of controversies at firms such as Google and Apple which use the Irish tax regime .

Ciaran Lynch, chairman of the Irish parliament's finance committee, is pressing ahead with a watered down inquiry, which he said would look at "global taxation and how Ireland engages with the global tax architecture". It will call on evidence from revenue commissioners, finance ministry officials, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and other experts. However, no company executive will face questioning.

Calls for Apple and other multinationals to give an account of their tax arrangements in Ireland had been led by Sinn Fein's finance spokesman, Pearse Doherty. "How can we look anybody in the eye out there and defend the type of austerity measures that this government is introducing when we're unwilling to take companies in [before parliament] who are not paying their fair share in this state?" he said.

"It can only be presented as this committee protecting these multinational firms who pay no tax here, who don't employ anybody and who don't pay any tax internationally. I think it makes a mockery out of this committee, an absolute mockery."

Lynch dismissed this view, insisting there was no need for Ireland to replicate evidence from tax investigations undertaken by the UK's public accounts committee and the US's Senate subcommittee on investigations.

"If there has been suggestions that companies have been 'off side' on tax, then the right people to go are those who make the rules. You don't go to Manchester United or Chelsea when they're accused of being offside – you go to the referee, or to Fifa or Uefa," he said.

Some of Apple's largest Irish subsidiaries were found not to be tax resident anywhere, prompting Carl Levin, chair of the Senate subcommittee on investigations, to call Ireland a tax haven.

Sheila Killian, a lecturer in accounting and finance at Limerick University, has raised concerns that Ireland's aggressive competitiveness on tax is part of a corrosive "race-to-the-bottom" culture. She has said these arrangements can "really bleed tax from other jurisdictions, particularly [poorer nations in] the global south.

"Less money goes in aid to the south than flies from the south in capital. If you allow your tax system to be used by multinational firms to facilitate that kind of flight, that's very problematic."